Polo’s undertaking will revolve around the radical twist that the notion of the clandestine has gradually acquired in recent decades. The historical sequence of such shift covers a scope encompassing the antifascist clandestine militancy (consolidated by mid XX century) to the illegal status, devised contemporarily by any Estate, rendering prisoners millions of people living amongst first world citizens. These “undocumented” human beings are, on the contrary, relentlessly screened by Estate administrations, denied any liberty or rights while forced to become a clandestine enslaved workforce. Invisible, and yet very corporeal, contemporary migrants are coerced to live as “false citizens” (fulfilling a myriad of obligations) before administrative authorities decide whether they are worthy of acquiring the status of a person.

To problematize these notions the project will take the shape of a workshop and regular discussions and interlocutions taking as a departure point her intensive immersion in a barely recognised sequence of Spanish and French recent history: the anonymous and clandestine democratic struggle against Francoism, lead chiefly by the illegalised Spanish Communist Party (PCE), coerced to orchestrate it’s struggle from the Parisian banlieue rouge with the relentless support of the French Communist Party (PCF).

Can anything be salvaged from this struggle to help rekindle social bounds and equip us to face up to our contemporary situation? How can we think and talk about what has not been thought nor talked about beyond minor groups that are inaccessible at present and remain cut off from the sanctioned past? Can contemporary clandestinity become a political force? Are first world citizens doomed to arrive to the condition of “undocumented” migrants given the state of securitization and the gradual cutting of liberties and rights? Is it purely nostalgic to affirm a WE in contemporary times?